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David Mckitterick. a History of Cambridge University Press. Vol. I

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David Mckitterick. a History of Cambridge University Press. Vol. I 179 Books in Review / Comptes rendus David McKitterick. A Historyof Cambridge University Press. Vol. I: Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge, I534-£698. Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xxiv, 500 pp.; £65 (cloth). IsBN o-521-308ol-I. This is the first volume of a projected three-volume history of the university press at Cambridge. Its author, David McKitterick, librarian of Trinity College and a leading scholar in the history of the book, takes the press from a very modest foundation in the sixteenth century to its thriving activity as a busy academic publisher by the end of the seventeenth century, just short of the age of Richard Bentley. A university press in England in the early modern period was quite a different thing from a university press today. The university's right to publish books was established by the charter of I534 (transcribed with slight inaccuracies on pp. 35-6, if figure I is indeed the original). Yet generally the university kept a distance from the day-to-day activities of those individuals who had been given the right to print and sell books within the community, but who in themselves were not really 'university publishers.' The work they produced ranged widely: academic pamphlets and Latin verse miscellanies, printed forms, manuals of logic, editions of the Bible, grammar texts, psalm books, books of English poetry (Herbert's Temple), even almanacs and other popular publications, and now and then what we would today call a scholarly publication, such as the splendidly produced Bede edited by Whelock. By the end of the period surveyed, the press had become very active with scholarly books, though the almanacs were still crucial for commer- cial survival. Cambridge printing defined itself not so much by its proximity to the university as by its relationship with the London trade. From the middle of the sixteenth century onwards, printing in Britain had been limited by royal charter to the control of the Stationers' Company in London. That Oxford and Cambridge had been allowed to have printers was based on the special charters that predated the 1559 regulation of the trade. The university printers were always aware of their· position at the margins. And the university's interventions in the business of the Cambridge press seemed largely a result of or response to pressures from London, sometimes to exercise censorship, at other times to protect the univrersity's right to maintain its local trade against the monopolistic thrust of the Stationers' Company. During the period covered by McKitterick we read a story not of a single institution, but of a series of overlapping businesses run by John Kingston, Thomas Thomas, John Legate, Cantrell Legge, Thomas Brooke, Leonard Greene, Thomas Buck, Roger Daniel, John Field, and John Hayes. What is surprising is how inexperienced some of these men were when they took to the trade: Thomas Thomas, for instance, was known to be 'utterlie ignoraunt in printinge,' and seems to have made the transition from a fellowship at King's to the book trade, not by any apprenticeship, but by having married the widow of the Cambridge stationer John Shere. And Thomas's successor, John Legate, got his sure start by 180 Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada 32/2 marrying Thomas's daughter Anne. McKitterick never really explains how Thomas, or the even more successful but similarly inexperienced Buck, ever learned the job, though he allows that 'the running of the Cambridge press depended on there being a constant supply of London-trained journeymen who could take a responsible part in composition and presswork' (p. 237). He does show, in remarkable detail, how complicated and cut-throat the business could be, as the printers struggled to keep in competition with the trade in London and with the huge numbers of books imported from overseas. Then, as now, the secret seemed to be in responding quickly to perceived needs, in identifying niches in the trade, and in careful management of the numerous details of money, time, materials, and workers. With its many specific facts regarding the careers of so many printers Mc- Kitterick's narrative cannot help but sag occasionally. But the reader will be impressed by the way the author has taken sometimes quite scattered materials (from the university records, the Stationers' Company, wills, the material books themselves, and so on) and patiently constructed a broadly realized history out of them. The research is outstanding. For many readers, however, the most interesting chapters will be those that eschew narrative and concentrate on a synoptic view. This seems to be McKit- terick's special strength. Chapter 12,'Authors and Printers,' could be read with profit by anyone who works with English books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not just specialists in publishing history or bibliography. The author's thesis here is that the book at this time is a less than stable medium, and that an understanding of the details of the relations between author, printer, proof-reader, and reader will show the book to be a series of compromises that are often struck in the particularity of the moment. In other words (and as every bibliographer must know) the printed book is not the exactly duplicated article of mechanical reproduction implied by Elizabeth Eisenstein. Though text in printed form is certainly more stable than in manuscript, McKitterick's many examples show us that the early modern book, with its variants, cancels, errata sheets, and so on, is a comparatively loose medium. The idea of the book as a fixed industrial object seems to have arisen only in our post-industrial age. Chapters 13 (on licensing), 14 (on running the printing house), and 15 (on type, paper, and other material conditions of trade) likewise give fascinating glimpses into the early press, and certain generalizations are easily applicable to the history of books outside of Cambridge. Because McKitterick concentrates on the very rich archive of the local scene, he is able to construct a convincing sense of what can be known, and also what cannot be known, about early modern printing from surviving evidence. Occasionally one wishes for more context, not so much for England, which is covered well, but for the continent. One wonders how university, or more correctly, academic presses in France, Italy, and Germany were managed, espe- cially because so much of English academic life was dependent on Latin publica- tion imported from abroad. On the whole, did Cambridge publishers create reading taste or did they respond to it? And if they tended to respond to it (which is my understanding, after reading this book), where was that taste generated? 18I Books in Review / Comptes rendus Abroad, in London, or within the smaller world of the University? Granted, McKitterick decided not to account for 'varying reactions of readers' to Cam- bridge books, but those hard-to-measure qualities of 'taste' and 'fashion' are as much part of the publishing business as paper supply or problems in capitaliza- tion. I suspect such issues will become increasingly central as the story moves closer to the present, and as publishers more overtly acknowledge the intangibles in their own records and correspondence. The book is beautifully produced - far more exactly and attractively than many of the pre-17oo productions it discusses, as the standards of book production in England rarely paralleled those of the Continent. It is, however, printed on abnormally heavy paper and weighs not much less than a small slab of marble. Protected by a black and gold dust jacket and richly bound in black cloth stamped with maroon and gold, this book radiates material and institutional authority. Some readers may wish to attend carefully to this presentation and work out its implications for the meaning of a Cambridge University and its Press today. WILLIAM BARKER Memorial University of Newfoundland Keith Maslen. An Early London PrintingHouse at Work: Studies in the Bowyer Ledgers. New York: The Bibliographical Society of America, 1993. x, 256 pp.; $30.oo U.s. for members of the Bibliog- raphical Society of America and The Bibliographical Society; $50.oo U.s. to others (cloth). IsmN 0-914930-16-8. An Early London PrintingHouse at Work brings together a series of studies in the eighteenth-century English book trade which were issued over a period of more than forty years. The studies are based upon the ledgers of William Bowyer, father and son, whose London printing house flourished from I699 to 1777. (It continued into the nineteenth century under the direction of John Nichols, the younger Bowyer's partner.) All but one of the essays are by Keith Maslen who describes them in his introduction as 'parerga or outworks leading to the massive edifice of the Maslen-Lancaster edition of the Bowyer ledgers.' Publication of The Bowyer Ledgers: The PrintingAccounts of William Bowyer Father and Son Reproduced with a Checklist of Bowyer Printing I699 :777. A Commen- tary, Indexes, and Appendixes by The Bibliographical Society and The Bibliog- raphical Society of America occurred in 199I. The present volume serves as a companion to that work. The volume begins with Herbert Davis's pioneering paper on the Bowyer paper stock ledger, delivered at a joint meeting of The Bibliographical Society and the Oxford Bibliographical Society on 14 April 195 1.Davis's purpose was to call attention to this relatively unknown historical source, for the paper stock ledger.
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